Open-source framework simulates cyber-physical systems

LONDON — A European funded project has released an open-source framework which seamlessly simulates, in an integrated way, both the networking and the processing parts of cyber-physical systems (CPS), as well as cloud and high-performance computing systems.

Cyber-physical systems are supersets of embedded systems, integrating sensing, computation, control, and networking into physical objects and infrastructure. While IoT refers mainly to uniquely identifiable internet-connected devices and embedded systems, CPS refers to the combination of the multiple hardware devices and software (including computational) aspects of a system, together with its relationship with the physical world.

The European project, a three-year program which began in February 2015 and received 2.88 million euros (about $3.5 million) in funding from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program, addresses the lack of simulation tools and models for full system design and analysis. This is mainly because most existing simulation tools for complex CPS only efficiently handle parts of a system while mainly focusing on performance.

They also require extreme amounts of processing resources and computation time to accurately simulate the CPS nodes’ processing. Faster approaches are available, however as they function at high levels of abstraction, they cannot provide the accuracy required to model the exact behavior of the system under design to guarantee that it meets the requirements in terms of performance and/or energy consumption.

The new open source COSSIM framework, as it is called, developed in a R&D cooperation between STMicroelectronics with Politecnico di Milano, Telecommunication Systems Institute and Synelixis, was successfully evaluated on an advanced client-server visual search use case that detects instances of objects. The evaluation included co-simulation with an experimental embedded system made by ST Microelectronics.